Disappointments
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A snake on a staff admonishes the Dutch to conserve power, at the Amsterdam Hospital OLVG.
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Copious bike parking, and a pulley to get stuff to the top floor. This scene is typical for Amsterdam.
Sometime in the morning a new, lower tone entered my ear, and instead of the museums, I sought out the local hospital. The beautiful, polite intern who examined me explained that people hear rings, and we rarely know why. It could be tenitus, and it would be useful to have an Ear, Nose and Throat specialist take a look when I return to the States. Also, I could arrange with a General Practitioner to clean the peanut butter from my ears.
After some mediterranean kabob thing and chips topped with ketchup and mayonnaise, I rode back to Centraal, where I’d stowed my luggage in a locker, as hostels have a 10AM checkout. I found another hostel from the guidebook, the Kabul, which had many rooms up a twisty flight of stairs or two. I dropped my stuff off there and trammed over towards the Van Gogh museum. I started with the modern art gallery next door. You know, because it was there. I left disappointed. I guess the thought of dropping €5 on a dinky little modern art gallery with very little good stuff in it at all was all the more frustrating because just a few days ago I’d been through the happy monument to modern art that is London’s Tate Modern.
The Van Gogh place had a line outside, I figured I’d hit it good and proper in the morning, and wandered through town, vaguely looking for a place I might connect the laptop for an upload session. No such luck.
I got back to Kabul, and wrote Janet a letter, and wandered out in search of the elusive Paradox coffeehouse that the guidebook reccommended as a good place to smoke. I figured that this expedition would have the educational bonus of requiring me to explore a different part of town.
I purchased €5 of some sort of grass, and proceeded to roll myself a pathetic joint that burned something crazy and fell apart as I tried to inhale it. I scraped the good buds together and returned them to my bag, and approached the bar for advice. A kindly patron consoled me with the cruel fact that “we all gotta learn sometime” and then allowed further that this was perhaps not the most admirable skill that one could be an expert at, as he deftly demonstrated How Things are Done.
